


the undone, the undoing

by CloudDreamer



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: And the results thereof, Awkward Conversations, Blaseball is horrifying actually, Chinese Wyatt Quitter, Disassociation, Gender Dysphoria, Identity Horror, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Self Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sensory Deprivation, Shelling, The Grand Unslam, The Wyatt Masoning, Transmasc Wyatt Quitter, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:33:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27585482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: A couple of weeks into their tenure with the Tokyo Lifts, Val Hitherto’s curiosity about their teammate Wyatt Quitter comes to a head with an innocuous question.One they don’t have an answer to. Or, well, they do have an answer.But it’s not an answer that would make any sense to someone like her.
Relationships: Wyatt Quitter & Val Hitherto
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	the undone, the undoing

**Author's Note:**

> TWs in the tags. Blaseball fic typical blending of wiki content and my own head canons. 
> 
> Recommended listening: Shake off Your Flesh by the Huntress and Holder of Hands

“Hey, Quitter.” 

The words take a couple of seconds too long to sink in, someone’s trying to get their attention. They’ve been staring at their nails. They’d bitten them down to the quick again last night, but they’d healed quick. One of the rare consolation prizes: Blaseball players don’t stay injured, if it’s outside of the game. Or maybe another way it keeps them imprisoned. Wyatt hasn’t talked to anyone about it. If they did, they’d have to ask if anyone else had tried, if anyone else had failed like they had.

The person talking is one of the other Lifts. Val? Yeah. She’s about to repeat herself when Wyatt turns their head to face her. They keep forgetting to do that. They never needed to turn to face anyone Inside. All those voices managed the moment they tried to talk to them. 

“Never,” they reply, throwing up their trademark grin. Too slowly. Does she notice Wyatt doesn’t feel it? They don’t know. The shapes that make up her expression are utterly alien to them now. Too long without them. “What’s up?“ 

Val takes a seat on the other end of the couch Wyatt had found themself sitting on, when they’d come to from the haze of the day. She brushes some terribly dyed hair out of her face. Streaks of the Lift colors, to match her nails. Still a child to all this. She really brought the story that this shit was an opportunity, not a curse. Wyatt wonders if she plans on redoing them when her team loyalties get switched around. When she’ll stop bothering. How long until she turns to ash before their eyes. 

Another name on the long list of casualties. Another person Wyatt can’t bring themself to give a flying fuck about. Not that they’ll be any less charming, of course. They’ll grin and bear it, even when they feel like they’re dead already. Not that they’d be able to escape this shit even then.

“This is probably a super nosy question, so feel free to yell at me if it’s not cool, but I was wondering. Just a bit...”

“Eat,” Wyatt says, not wanting her to drag it out too long. They’ve got a long list of questions they’ve been waiting for someone on this shit-out-of-luck new team to get up the nerve to ask, and they’re trying to calculate what level of messed up this’ll be. 

“Why Wyatt?”

The words come out too quickly. Again, Wyatt fails to process right away.

“What.”

The response is flat. Too flat. 

“Why stay Wyatt? You got everything else about you back, right?” They nod to confirm, narrowing their eyes at Val. Not in suspicion or anger, more... trying to figure her out. Maybe it comes across as angry, because she’s quick to apologize, saying she doesn’t need an answer. 

It’s not a bad question. It just catches them off guard. They were preparing quippy ways of deflecting about the whole stick in a giant peanut for months on end thing or the forced to play for the god that’d did it to them. The whole Wyatt thing was old news. They’d forgotten about it a couple of times, even, back when they were at their worst. Wyatt searches for an answer that doesn’t reveal too much but will satisfy her. They don’t want her to feel like a jerk, but they want the conversation to continue even less. 

“Gender stuff,” they say, lightly. They try to gauge her reaction. Is she disappointed they’re not sharing more? Damnit, they used to be good at this talking nonsense. The Tacos had got them, and they’d got the Tacos. They’d fit into a team. 

Val nods politely.

“I get that!”

No. She doesn’t.

“That all you wanted to drag up or?” 

“Oh! Yeah. Sorry. I guess I’ll see you at practice?” 

They give a thumbs up, and she scurries off, presumably to harass someone else. Maybe Wyatt should’ve tried to give a better answer. They wouldn’t have right after it went down, but they’d put together enough of the pieces in the weeks that’d followed. They’d talked to the others, to NaN, the Microphone, the commissioner— who was doing just a _great_ job, and they’d found words for the indescribable.

It’d started with the Grand Unslam, really, Moses Simmons hitting that ball so fast and so far it went right through reality, left things in tatters. The Los Angeles they’d grown up in, shattering like glass. The sky split apart like a hammer had struck apart and a wave washed done. A wave of their pizza place growing up, where the buildings are stuck together at the wrong angles. There were doors to no where and doors to their childhood room, where a dark haired kid they recognized as their younger self, if their ears were pointy and teeth sharpened to a point, and they swung open and closed according to some grand rhythm that they couldn’t piece together. It refused to harmonize in their mind, and as they blinked, the pieces rearranged themselves.

It was skyscrapers, piercing the fields with their points, and something they recognized as an umpire sat at a desk stuck to the outside, all wrong, doing paperwork that drifted to the ground, falling through another rift that reflected the transparent walls right back. Someone was screaming, someone was laughing, someone was crying, and the crowd was cheering wildly. Was this an act of the gods or had they broken something all on their own? 

They hadn’t known. Nobody had. All they’d known was that they’d needed to play, because, if there’s one rule that’d been drilled into them again and again, it was that the show must go on. 

Val might’ve been watching, one of millions of fools with their eyes stuck to the screen, unable to look away from the horrible beauty of reality itself coming undone, but they doubt it. She wouldn’t be so excited to play, so determined to cover herself in this team’s colors, if she’d watched. If she’d watched people they’d loved turned to ash.

Or maybe that was just the prelude, and it really started with an incineration. Wyatt Mason’s, a couple of games down the line. Was it one? Was it twenty? They didn’t know. They remembered his incineration clearly— the attempted one, anyway— but not the days before and after. Somehow, existence tearing itself apart became mundane. Tedious, in its terror. There were only so many nights they could spend, huddled up with their teammates in front of the TV, desperate for someone to come and say it was going to be okay, that they hadn’t destroyed the universe— hell, multiverse — by doing their job too well. 

Things stabilized eventually but not before the heat tried to boil Wyatt Mason from the inside out, turning his body to dust to be blown away by the wind. The Umpire’s eyes had blown golden, focusing in on the Tacos one by one, before settling on him. Wyatt, who tried so hard, who’d never played a splort before. Who liked to go on hikes, not desperate sprints, who wasn’t made for this monstrous, ugly game. And this Wyatt had made this sound with their throat, too deep and too guttural to be mistaken for anything other than pain, pure pain. Sharp loss.

Then the heat flared out, passing over the other team entirely and reaching into every Taco. They’d thought it was the grief at first, then they’d thought they were being incinerated too— good, they’d thought bitterly, good— and then.

And then they had been Wyatt Mason.

He knew he’d been someone else before, that this body wasn’t his only one, and this wasn’t the only him that could wear this body. But he didn’t care. He was himself, and if the others in this strange void of everything and nothing were also him, then they were. And his body had felt right for the first time in forever, because Wyatt Mason was a person who was comfortable in his own skin. He molded it to fit him; he was not molded. 

He was a nexus for a hundred thousand worlds, too assured of his own self to be claimed by the fire that’d tried to consume him. He was his long black hair that he’d started cutting on his own in high school on a dare and never really stopped, the tattoo of a fern on the back of his neck that he’d designed himself, and his nails painted a different color every week. 

The kaleidoscope of reality echoed around him. Everywhere he turned was a dozen different mirrors, except what they reflected was wrong. They reflecred a life he hadn’t lived. Three women stood in a dark kitchen, whispering to each other about making ends meet— the word “cursed” passed one of their lips— while the kid they worried about stood behind a corner, trying to pick up the conversation. The women don’t seem to notice they’re there, and as Wyatt blinks, another scene grabs his attention, That kid, a bit older, trying on a binder for the first time, except this time that kid’s got four arms and before they’d only had one. The scenes reach out in fractals, each branch splitting into infinite nuance. 

Unease. Each of those bodies were ill fitting, not meant for the one who wore it, an emotion foreign to Wyatt.

So, it wasn’t not about gender that when he’d heard the static that’d been slowly rising in the back of his mind start to clarify, like a radio being tuned in. Those images he’d watched for what might’ve been seconds or minutes or hours, of what he’d eventually figured was his teammate Quitter’s life in splinters, started to pull together and pull for him.

Then, for a moment, they were everything at once, and they were Quitter, and they were Mason, and they were a god. They had a moment to chose, between who they had been and who they were now, and they’d hesitated. Because going back meant abandoning this sense of belonging, this identity so fierce it could tear a void in reality itself. 

And as they lingered, they lost the chance to reform perfectly. 

Wyatt doesn’t regret the moment. They are themself again, they have their memories in tact, and their body reformed as it was before, but there are traces. There are the days they roam through forests, nothing but the sound of their own heartbeat to keep them company, and listen to the birds sing, there are the nights they find their stir fry intolerable, when their Sichuan tongue usually finds anything that doesn’t burn like the failed incineration dull, and there are the rare seconds they feel at home in this form. 

When the hallucinations get too bad, when they forget they’re human and not just a piece in this fucked up game between gods, they come back to that. The piece of Wyatt Mason that resides in their soul is stable, unshakeable. 

He is not afraid of the dark so they can sleep with the lights off, at least some of the time. He accepts the touch they starve for.

Wyatt keeps moving.


End file.
